Gareth and th Lost Island (24 page)

“Mythical gods above and below, I have terrible
timing!” Tralnis swore from behind them.

“Yes, yes you do!” Izzy agreed wholeheartedly.

“The Captain wants us to meet her in her ready room
to come up with a plan before we interrogate our prisoner,” Tralnis
informed them.

Izzy rested her forehead against Gareth’s.
“Raincheck?” she requested softly.

“Most definitely, my lady,” Gareth replied. He
stepped back, and his eyes lost focus again for a moment. When he
came back to the here and now, he knew what they should do to get
the Scaled One to talk. “Head back and tell Elizabeth to meet us in
the galley instead. I have an idea, and we’ll need Henry’s help to
pull it off,” he suggested.

The Scaled One was not in anything remotely like a
good mood. Not only had he awoken tied to a chair, but his jaw
throbbed in agony after the Dwarf doctor had reset it. The chair
was in a large cleared out section of what he assumed was the
Leyship’s cargo hold. Hearing the Dwarf mutter about the futility
of patching someone up, just so they could beat the hells out of
him again lowered the former pirate captain’s mood even more. The
door the Scaled One was facing opened and in walked the two demons
that would haunt his nightmares. ‘Strike that – three demons’ he
thought as the human female with the short red hair followed the
other two into the cargo hold. Behind her was an orange furred Chim
holding a large black sack, and grinning like the Winter Solstice
had come early for him.

“Captain, I must formally object to what you are
planning. As ship’s surgeon, this man is now my patient, and I am
bound by my oath as a healer to do no harm,” Tralnis said, reciting
the lines they had come up with earlier.

Elizabeth didn’t respond for almost a minute.
Instead, she spent that time staring down the Dwarf who dared to
question her orders. “You are dismissed for the next hour or so,
Doctor. After that, depending on what the prisoner is willing to
tell us, we may have need of you again. That is of course if he
lives until then,” she said coldly.

“Riiiiight,” Tralnis muttered, drawing out the word.
He turned, and lightly tapped the Scaled One’s chest. “Sorry Lad,
but she scares the living hells out of me. You’re on your own,” he
whispered. The Dwarf gave the prisoner one final look over, and
then walked out of the cargo hold. With his back to the Scaled One,
Tralnis gave Gareth a huge grin and a wink.

Gareth walked past the prisoner on his way to a table
where Henry was setting up shop. At the moment, the Chim was making
a show of checking the straps they had recently (and quite hastily)
installed on the galley table. Gareth picked up a chair near the
table, and sat it down in front of the Scaled One with the back of
the chair facing him. The chair was placed just close enough to
make the pirate feel uncomfortable as his personal space was
invaded. With a nod from Elizabeth, Gareth sat down backwards on
the chair, and rested his arms along the top of the chair’s back.
“
Greetings, my name is Professor Mintel,”
he hissed in the
Scaled One’s native language.

The pirate captain was shocked to hear the Sand
Tongue come out of the mouth of a human. “
What do you want,
hairless Chim?”
he spat back in the same language, trying to
keep up his bravado.

“I want to give you an option – tell me what I want
to know now, or I let my friend over there play with you for a
while, and
then
you’ll tell me what I want to know,” Gareth
replied, switching back to Trade.

Even though it hurt his jaw almost as bad as when it
was originally broken, the Scaled One laughed at the threat. “Is
that it? Am I supposed to be scared by a hairless Chim threatening
to turn me over to his hairy cousin?” he scoffed. “Let me go now,
and I’ll make sure you are all sold somewhere other than an
Aetherium mine,” he offered.

Gareth shook his head sadly. “To be fair, and to help
you make an informed decision, I should probably tell you a little
bit about my friend. Henry is a free Chim born on IRD soil. His
parents however were a different story. They were both former
slaves who managed to escape from the labor camps on Skirrth,” he
said, mentioning the continent where the Scaled Ones came from.
“They died early in Henry’s life from the abuse they received at
the hands of your kind, but not before telling him every horror
story of their time as slaves. Those stories led Henry to acquire a
hobby that would be seen as odd at best, and revolting at worst, in
polite society,” Gareth informed him.

“What’s that? Picking lice off of non-Chims?” the
Scaled One responded with a sneer.

Gareth slowly turned his head to look at Henry. When
out of the corner of his eye he saw the Scaled One had turned his
head to look also, Gareth went on. “Nothing like that, I’m afraid.
You see, Henry likes to torture Scaled Ones. I know I should try to
discourage him, but there’s a sick sort of beauty watching an
artist like him work,” he said.

Henry heard his cue and started taking items out of
the sack, and lay them lovingly on a crate near the table. The
first “torture” tool he pulled out was a simple corkscrew with a
wooden handle. Holding the handle in his hand with the metal screw
sticking out between his fingers, Henry closely examined the tool.
With the index finger of his other hand, he touched the pointy tip,
and quickly withdrew his hand. He sucked on his injured finger as
he laid the corkscrew on the crate.

The next tool he took out of the bag was a long, two
pointed meat fork. Of course the Scaled One had no idea that the
meat fork had never been used for anything other than turning meat
in a hot oven. With a quick jab, Henry buried the pointy end of the
meat fork into the wooden crate next to the corkscrew.

Henry paused and turned around to look at the Scaled
One. Instead of meeting the lizard’s eyes, Henry leaned forward and
squinted as if he were appraising the pirate. Nodding his head to
himself. Henry turned around, and pulled out a medium sized melon
baller out of the sack. He held it up to his mouth, breathed on it,
and polished the inside of the scoop with his vest.

The garlic press Henry pulled out of the sack made
the Scaled One cringe as his imagination worked overtime on how
those wicked looking tools might be used. The final item Henry
pulled out of the sack had the Scaled One’s imagination throwing up
its hands in defeat. The Chim was holding what looked like a human
skull with metal teeth. When Henry turned the skull to “look” in
the pirate’s direction, it began clacking its jaws together
slowly.

“What in the hells is that?!” the frightened pirate
begged to know.

“That old thing? That’s just the enchanted skull of a
temple guard that died during the Second Great Apocalypse. We call
him Chompers. He said he’s looking forward to seeing how chewy you
might be,” Gareth replied. The skull then started opening and
shutting its jaw at a furious pace.

Henry pretended that the skull was pulling him
towards the prisoner. He then continued to pretend that he was
fighting with the skull, moving his outstretched arms all over the
place. The skull stopped clacking its jaw when Henry finally placed
it down on the crate. He held up one finger in front of it as if
telling a dog to stay.

Gareth fought hard to keep a smile off of his face.
He was amazed at the how close Henry and the skull had become with
just a simple system of one clack for “yes” and two for “no”.
Gareth schooled his expression, and turned to face the now properly
frightened Scaled One. “Like I said, you can either speak with me
now, or… Henry can get his play time in, and then you’ll speak with
me. You have my word that if you cooperate, I won’t let Henry near
you,” Gareth promised.

A forked tongue shot out and wet lips that were
suddenly very dry. “What do you want to know?” the pirate
inquired.

“Let’s start with what you lot did with the human
child who was on board this ship,” Gareth replied.

“Unlike the rest of your crew, I knew we could get a
heavy purse from selling the girl instead of your engineer,” the
Scaled One stated. With a quick glance at the human who had ruined
his knee and jaw with her hands tied behind her back, he added, “No
offense intended.”

Snapping his fingers, Gareth retrieved the pirate’s
attention. “Where is the girl now?” he inquired.

“The next shipment of slaves out of Chimia isn’t due
for another month, so she’ll be at our camp. Considering it’s our
headquarters for operations in Chimia, you should probably just
write her off as a loss and move on. There’s no way you’ll get out
of the camp alive, even if you do manage to figure out a way inside
the most heavily defended outpost this side of the Sacred Sands,”
the Scaled One said.

Elizabeth stepped forward and glared at the pirate
with her one eye. “And why is that?” she asked, her voice cold
enough to flash freeze an entire lake.

The Scaled One managed a weak smile around the pain
of his jaw. “The camp is in a box canyon with only one way in. It’s
guarded by sentries with rifles covering the entrance, and three of
our dirigibles are moored to the cliff sides above the camp. The
sentries will shoot anyone without the proper password, and the
airships will decimate any ship other than ours that are foolhardy
enough to fly into a blind canyon,” he explained.

“Where will they be keeping the girl?” Gareth
inquired.

“She’s probably being kept in the high value cages at
the rear of the camp. Not that it will help you. There’s no way you
are getting into the camp,” the pirate replied.

Gareth leaned forward, invading the pirate’s personal
space even more than he had before. “What’s the password to get
into the camp?” he asked simply.

“I don’t think so. If I give you the password and you
all get yourself killed, I’ll starve to death on this horrible
excuse for an airship,” the Scaled One stated.

To change the prisoner’s mind, Gareth silently
pointed at Henry. Chompers, having the most fun since he had died,
obliged and clacked his jaws loudly.

“Lizards rule, mammals drool,” the pirate said
quickly in fear.

“You’re kidding, right?” Izzy asked.

The Scaled One craned its neck to look at her. “It’s
not likely that I’m going to lie to you knowing the punishment is
being handed over to a psychotic Chim and his possessed skull,” he
snapped back.

Nodding his head, Gareth said, “He’s got a point
there. He knows Henry would let loose Chomper on his groin if he
lied to us.”

Elizabeth shuddered in disgust. “Thanks for that
visual, Professor,” she said sarcastically. “Can you think of
anything else to talk to this bastard about?” she asked Gareth.

Gareth stood up and slid the chair to the side.
“Nope. He’s all yours, Captain,” he stated with a bow.

Elizabeth stepped up so her scarred face was only a
foot from the Scaled One. “Be glad Professor Mintel convinced me to
be polite. Had it been my choice, you would still be facing ‘Happy
time with Henry’, with me handing him his instruments. As it is,
I’m just going to have you thrown off of my ship,” she told
him.

“Wait!! You said you weren’t going to kill me if I
told you what you wanted to know!” the Scaled One complained.

Elizabeth shook her head, and gave him her best evil
smile. “The Professor said nothing of the sort. He said he wouldn’t
turn you over to our cook if you did what we asked,” she corrected.
Elizabeth straightened up, and said, “Sheldon, if you would
please.”

After the Kwa-Kwa-Ur turned a crank mounted on the
wall, the Scaled One saw the cargo hold flooded with light from the
outside. The sudden chill running down the pirate’s spine had
nothing to do with the breeze which blew in from the open cargo
ramp behind him. The Kwa-Kwa-Ur grabbed the back of the chair the
pirate was tied to, and started dragging it towards the open
ramp.

“Wait, Sheldon!” Izzy called out. The Scaled One
swallowed in relief, thinking he had been given a reprieve from the
least likely source. “I really don’t think we want to toss one of
our chairs off the ship,” she chided him.

The left eyestalk twisted around to look at Izzy.
“It’s not one of ours. We picked it, and a couple others like it,
up when we emptied the other ship’s cargo hold,” it explained.

“Oh… carry on then,” Izzy said cheerfully.

As they reached the open ramp, the right eyestalk
bent over to look the pirate in the face. “Have a nice
trip
!” it said.

Not to be let out, the left eyestalk added, “Yeah…
see you next
fall
!” Sheldon grumbled something, and covered
his face with his massive palm.

Using both hands, Sheldon lifted the chair occupied
by the terrified pirate over his head. The Scaled One screamed as
the Kwa-Kwa-Ur tossed him off the ship. The scream cut off far
sooner than the pirate expected when he hit the swamp less than ten
feet below the end of the cargo ramp. The force of the impact was
enough to smash the chair, giving the Scaled One a chance to free
himself. He glared up at the Leyship, and saw the Dwarf doctor
standing at the edge of the ramp smiling at him.

“Unlike you worthless goat molesters, we only kill
when we have to,” Tralnis scolded him. The Dwarf stepped aside as
Izzy and Gareth led their other prisoners down the cargo ramp. The
rest of the pirates were wearing burlap sacks over their heads like
the ones they forced Izzy and Pilot to wear. Not wanting a good gag
to die just yet, Tralnis gave a low whistle, and said, “Will you
look at that. The trees look like tiny little blades of grass from
way up here.” The pirates were thoroughly confused, and kept
screaming when they hit the ground almost immediately after being
tossed from the ramp.

Izzy stood at the end of the cargo ramp, and admired
their handiwork. A bubble burst loudly next to one of the pirates,
causing him to scream again. Izzy looked closer at the pool of
viscous liquid just a few feet off their starboard side. Another
bubble burst, and Izzy started to smile. She had been an engineer
for far too long not to recognize the acrid smell of naphtha.
Turning to face her friends, she stated cheerfully, “I think I have
a way to take care of the other pirate ships.”